Basepack

Basepack is a Ruby on Rails framework for quick creation of information systems.

Basepack dramatically helps you to start your new project. There are out of the box form fields like: date (datepicker), datetime, html5 wysiwig, tags, file upload and others. Further more there is support for dynamic field hiding depending on state of other fields as well as options of selectbox content modifications dependant on other fields.

Basepack contains a lot of predefined forms, views and actions which you might need (filter form, bulk changes, delete_all, import, export, ...).

Features

• Quick development of forms - generates forms for resource by short DSL metadata settings.
• Rich set of business types support (datetime, wysiwig, tags, phone number, ...)
• Search and filtering, saved filters
• Automatic form validation
• Import and Export functionality for resource
• Easy way to create custom actions
• Security: permited parameters are automatically defined against fields in edit forms which are (read-write).
• Authentication (via Devise)
• Authorization (via Cancan)

All the field form definitions are done by RailsAdmin and are configured accordingly. It simplifies configuration process and if you wish to use RailsAdmin as an admin interface.

Documentation

Tutorial

See project wiki.

Demo

Currently zorec is preparing basepace_example application

The running application will be available at http://basepack-example.herokuapp.com/

Installation

In your Gemfile, add the following dependencies:

gem "basepack"

Run:

bundle install

And then run:

rails g basepack:install

The generator will install several gems. Also, generator asks to delete app/views/layouts/application.html.erb because differend .haml version will be created. If you don't know what to answer then answer 'yes' to generator's question.

In a bigger project do not forget to change ability in app/models/ability.rb. By default, the generator adds can :manage, :all to enable anybody to perform any action on any object. See more on CanCan wiki.

Migrate your database and start the server:

rake db:migrate
rails s

Generator usage

You can easily generate new resource (scaffold for the resource) by rails g scaffold NAME [field[:type][:index] field[:type][:index]] [options]. E.g.

rails g scaffold Project name short_description description:text start:date finish:date
rails g scaffold Task name description:text project:references user:references

Then rake db:migrate rails s

Notice that:

1. Generated controllers inherits form ResourcesController.
2. Files for views are not generated (directories appp/views/projects and appp/views/tasks are empty), but all RESTful actions are working correctly. It is because views inherit default structure from controller inheritance) and you can easily override these defaults by creating appropriate files.

Basic usage

After scaffolding your resources, you can customize fields used in individual actions by Railsdmin DSL

File app/models/project.rb:

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :tasks, inverse_of: :project
  validates :name, :short_description, presence: true

  rails_admin do
    list do
      field :name
      field :short_description
      field :finish
    end

    edit do
      field :name
      field :short_description
      field :description, :wysihtml5
      field :start
      field :finish
     end

     show do
       field :name
       field :description
       field :start
       field :finish
     end
  end
end

File app/models/task.rb

class Task < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :project, inverse_of: :tasks
  belongs_to :user, inverse_of: :tasks
end

Add folowing line to app/models/user file:

   has_many tasks, inverse_of: user

Pleas note that inverse_of option is included on association. It is necessary for correct functioning of Basepack, see Rails documentation and RailsAdmin wiki for explaination.

Almoust all the staff what Baseback do is through Basepack::BaseController which inherit from ResourcesController. Full inheritance hierarchy looks this way:

ProjectsController < ResourcesController < Basepack::BaseController < InheritedResources::Base

If you are not familiar with InheritedResources, take a look at it.

You do NOT need to define permitted parameters anymore. It is defined by RailsAdmin DSL, more precisely by what you set as visible in edit action. So file app/models/project.rb:

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
  #...
  rails_admin do
    #...
    edit do
      field :name
      field :short_description
      field :description, :wysihtml5
      field :start
      field :finish
     end
   end
end

implicitly sets permitted params which could be written as:

def permitted_params
  params.permit(:project => [:name, :short_description, :description, :start, :finish])
end

in your projects controller. You can override these implicit settings by creating this method in case you want it.

Basic Architecture Background

Basepack is build on the top of several gems:

• Device for Authentication
• CanCan for Authorization
• InheritedResources makes your controllers inherit all restful actions.
• SimpleForm for creating Forms.
• nested-form for handling multiple models in a single form
• bootstrap-sass
• ...and others

Althoug you can use Basepack without knowing anything of the background architecture it is recommended to get to know at least with: InheritedResources, CanCan and Device.

Basepack was also inspired by RailsAdmin and still using RailsAdmin DSL for defining the forms, sessins and fields group.

License

This project rocks and uses LGPL-LICENSE.

Credits

RailsAdmin field views and some forms (export form) was originaly taken from rails-admin.

nested_form_ui - stylesheed and code for orderable was inspired by this project.